up:: Content
author:: Cory Dakota Satter
full title:: Americans Severed Their Connection With Space. And Now We’re Paying the Consequences.
url: Link
Highlights
- Skyrocketing drug use, hate crimes, political violence, and school shootings—I don’t know what else I’ve left out, but what do all of these have in common? Ultimately, they all have some relationship with meaning-making.
- In the absence of creative, pro-social outlets that bestow upon our lives more meaning, we might feel disoriented, isolated, and lost.
- Ever wonder why rural places tend to be more conservative? Well, there are many factors for that ranging from less diversity to lower levels of education. Truth be told, it varies between and within countries. But one factor is also related to monotonous lifestyles.
- Woodrow Wilson famously said, “Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness.” T
- Nevertheless, a huge advertising campaign linking the car with “the American Dream” and individual freedom or liberty—aided by the Great Depression’s bankruptcy of street cars—assisted one of the great social engineering projects in the history of mankind: the transition from people-oriented to automobile-oriented cities.
- The result was massive urban sprawl. Today, the best example of this is Phoenix, Arizona. The Metro Phoenix area is a massive expanse of asphalt and concrete covering 1,000 square miles. The Greater Phoenix area covers 17,000 square miles (37,000 kilometers, for non-American readers). This latter number is bigger than the entire country of Denmark—or the Netherlands or Switzerland.
- They feel cozy yet dynamic. They have bars and restaurants within walking distance, or you can bike. They have streetside cafés and parklets, art installations, or bluescapes (e.g. canals, rivers, lakes). Metro Phoenix, too, has all these things and yet it seems as if just about everything is 30 minutes apart—by car.
- road widening does very little to nothing to improve traffic congestion